Although many figurative sculptures
in the Metz Collection were created during the Romantic,
Symbolist, and Impressionist periods in French painting,
they could be most accurately described as Romantic Allegorical
figures. The influence of Romanticism can be found in
the naturalism of the figures and their environments,
and in the new involvement with movement in surface and
form in bronze. However, the figures have been transformed
from rulers and gods to vague allegories of Civic and
Moral Virtues, such as Victory, or the Thinker. Another
mutation of academic sculpture is also represented here:
although the standard for allegorical sculpture was a
human figure (most often female) wearing or bearing attributes
and representing a heroic figure associated with morally
edifying behavior, by the end of the century, these traits
had become thinly veiled and scantily draped excuses
to represent the female nude in every possible situation.

Aspects of
the Collection

These thirty pieces of sculpture are a small
part of a larger collection given by the estate of Dr. Arthur
R. Metz to Indiana University. An active alumnus and an
avid collector of both fine and decorative
arts, Dr. Metz retired from his medical practice in Chicago to the campus
of Indiana University in Bloomington.

Most of the collection, comprising around 900 objects—paintings,
photographs, books, porcelain, silver, animal artifacts,
and other memorabilia—is currently housed in the Metz
Suite, his retirement apartment in the Indiana
Memorial Union hotel. Fourteen bronze sculptures have been
accessioned into the collection of the Indiana
University Art Museum.

The term Animalier, applied
particularly to mid-nineteenth-century French sculpture
with animal subject matter, was first used
by a contemptuous press in 1831 when three sculptors—Antoine-Louis
Barye, Christophe Fratin and Alexandre Guionnet— exhibited
animal sculptures at the Paris Salon. The jury of the Salon,
still caught up in the waning neoclassical taste fostered
by the Napoleonic Empire, found the representation of animals
too common a subject for Salon exhibition, and before 1850
many sculptures were rejected by the Salon for that reason.
However, public interest in comparative anatomy and new
access to exotic animals at the Paris Jardin des Plantes
zoo soon
transformed the derogatory term Animalier into a specialty
many sculptors were proud to practice.
Many animal sculptures were modeled in plaster for
exhibition and cast later in bronze editions. The
size and variety of
an edition depended on the popularity of the piece at
exhibition, and many Barye, Mene, and Fratin pieces
were so popular that
they were cast in very large editions.